This blog is about shelley and the color orange and leo the superfantastic dogblob and coffee at midnight and plastic creatures that roar and bad hair days and sunlight reflecting off of a glass of cranberry juice and the smell of the air after a rainstorm and winning and lsing and taking photos and haikus that rock and maybe i forgot something, but you should read on anyway. i command it of you.

For, like, ever I had no idea what NYE meant. I suspected it had something to do with New York, possibly something like the stock exchange but not, and then allowed myself to be distracted and never do any knowledge-y follow up (which is totally a word). Now that I know what it is, I try to use it whenever I can, which is sadly only about a week a year, if that.

My 2012 NYE was one of the more low-key NYEs I have experienced and this is not bad. My bf and I had considered a NYE party, but we ended up playing LOTRO until 11 and then watched a movie about juicing. We are hardcore party people.

Today has been a day of lounging and mentally preparing to go back to work after a glorious week and a half off. I have also been stretching my crochet muscle and am hoping to rock a few projects. It’s been over a year since I held the crochet hook in my hand and things are not progressing as I would like, but I am patient. We will see.

February 5. A break in the freeze. A thaw, if you will. And we did. This was the first real walk that Leo and I took in over a month that didn’t end with my carrying him in all of his 30 pound pug glory back to the house.

He was a massive spaz in the very recent snowfall and it was delightful to watch after a trying month of cold weather and a double eye infection that rendered him even more of a dog-blob than usual.

Also delightful was to have the camera in hand again and to grab a few shots of my favorite subject.

Almost every time that I am faced with a blank page and the possibility of eyes besides my own pair looking at my groupings of letters, I hear Kevin’s voice from Kids in the Hall. In that high, nearly out of control warble that he is known to do, I hear the words “Write what you know! Write what you know! What do I know?”

Exactly. What do I know? I am currently trying to imagine what part of my insides are the most interesting to warrant putting on the outside and my stream of conscious is really quite fascinating (to me) and so there we are. A perfect beginning, to be sure.

The silence is unbroken and the darkness is giving no token or something like that. Lenore! I hear Leo breathing heavily and the computer humming behind me. Did I mention that it smells of corn and old books? A plane flies overhead and my stomach makes one of those weird noises that it has been doing lately. Last night it sounded like an alarm was going off somewhere down the darkened corridors of some old abandoned school whos walls are the color of sea foam and lit only with the emergency lights, but it was actually my stomach. Alien incubation has been mentioned as an exciting possibility.